Afshin talks about how he got into payments, his transition to Paysafe, and how the company continues to support merchants during the pandemic
TSG's Payment Gateway Directory, Now With 100 Gateways!
TSG is pleased to release its newest Payment Gateway Directory, sponsored by NMI. This year's edition looks at 100 payment gateway providers from large international players, to regional startups; covering over 3,000 data points.
Overview
This report offers in-depth coverage into leading/emerging gateways in the market, from topics such as target markets to integration models, the report provides valuable insight for purchase-decision making, competitive analysis, and partner selection. Details for each gateway (as available) include the following and more:
Average Annual Dollar/Transaction Volume
Gateway Pricing
Geographic Service Area
Target Markets
Development Environments
NEW: API Access Insights
Payment Types
Integration Models
Visit the landing page to download a preview and purchase.
Payments company Affirm filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “AFRM.” The San Francisco-based company, founded and led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, offers online installment loans. Affirm has been one of the more popular start-ups in the space. It announced a partnership with Shopify earlier this year, allowing merchants to offer installment loans on products they sell, and works with 6,500 merchants including Peloton, Expedia and Walmart. The eight-year-old company brought in roughly $510 million in revenue for the fiscal year ended on June 30 -- a 93% jump from last year, according to the filing.
Klarna, the leading global payments provider and shopping service, announced that it has reached a record 11 million customers in the US, representing a 106% increase year over year and a rapid climb from the 10 million milestone reached only three weeks before. The Klarna app has also seen accelerated momentum with currently more than two million monthly active users in the US. In September alone, the Klarna app accounted for 64% of all buy now, pay later app downloads in the US and took the number one spot among the most downloaded shopping apps in the US App Store, ahead of giants such as Amazon, Walmart and Target. The app also recorded an all-time high in shopping volume in September. This growth has continued, and the app is now averaging 50,000 new daily downloads, three times more than nearest direct competitors.
As eCommerce spending accelerates at an even greater rate due to the change in spending preferences brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of payment gateways is as crucial as ever. A high functioning and efficient payment gateway is the backbone of each transaction and gateways will be tested this holiday season as they facilitate an even higher amount of volume with the holiday shopping season fast approaching. In addition to consistent uptime, factors such as transaction speed, authorization failure rate, API accessibility, ease of onboarding, methods of payment supported, vertical and geographic reach, and overall cost are all important qualifying attributes in evaluating the strength of payment gateway offerings.
Payroc WorldAccess, LLC (“Payroc”), a leading merchant acquirer and global payment processing organization, announced the acquisition of Bluestone Payments, LLC. Founded by Linda Rossetti, Bluestone is an Independent Sales Organization launched in 2006. Bluestone provides payment programs to merchants through referral relationships in niche markets. “I’m extremely excited to bring Bluestone into the Payroc family,” said Joe Natoli, EVP of Mergers & Acquisitions at Payroc. “I have known Linda for over 25 years and always had a great deal of respect for her. Linda has a great understanding of how our industry works, and in previous roles, she was instrumental in ensuring we had the latest products and services the payments ecosystem had to offer.”
Google Pay for both Android and iOS is relaunching with a giant array of new features. It turns the app from something that most people think of as a tap-to-pay card repository or peer-to-peer payment system into a much more ambitious service. The new app begins rolling out across the United States this week. The new version of the app will have three new tabs: “Pay,” which includes peer-to-peer payments as well as your transaction history using tap-to-pay; “Explore,” which will be a place where Google will offer deals and discounts; and finally, “Insights,” which will allow you to connect your bank accounts to get a searchable overview of your finances.
Italy’s Nexi has struck its second tie-up in six weeks, agreeing a 7.8 billion euro ($9.2 billion) merger with Nordic rival Nets to create Europe’s largest payments group. Consolidation is sweeping through the fast-expanding payments industry and the all-share deal announced late on Sunday follows Nexi’s long-awaited accord to buy domestic rival SIA for 4.6 billion euros in shares. Nexi said the two transactions would create a group with pro-forma 2020 revenue of 2.9 billion euros and core profit of 1.5 billion euros, the largest at a European payments business. Nexi-Nets-SIA would also surpass rival heavyweight Worldline-Ingenico for the number of payment cards managed and retail outlets served.
PayPal announced that its customers can now use either PayPal or Venmo QR codes when checking out at more than 8,200 CVS retail stores across the U.S. This is the first national retailer to integrate PayPal’s QR code checkout technology at point-of-sale, the company noted. The additional checkout option will also expand the number of ways customers can pay “touch-free” at CVS — a way to transact that’s become increasingly popular as the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread across the country. CVS and PayPal announced their plans to cooperate on a point-of-sale solution back in July. At the time, they pegged the time frame for the rollout as sometime in Q4 2020.
Wish, which provides an e-commerce platform for ultra-bargain unbranded merchandise, filed on Friday with the SEC to raise up to $1.0 billion in an initial public offering. The company, which is named ContextLogic and is doing business as Wish, has the goal of bringing an affordable and entertaining mobile shopping experience to consumers around the world. Wish has become one of the largest and fastest growing global e-commerce platforms, connecting more than 100 million monthly active users in over 100 countries to over 500,000 merchants offering approximately 150 million items. The number of merchants on its platform in North America, Europe, and Latin America has grown about 234% since 2019, the number of merchants in the US has grown 268%.
Amid a pandemic that's seen the U.S. dollar tank in value, the price of bitcoin has exploded nearly 150% this year and 15% in the past week alone, sparking a wave of renewed attention from Wall Street as the pioneering cryptocurrency nears its all-time price peak from late 2017 (before the crypto market infamously crashed). At a New York Times conference on Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase's billionaire chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, who in 2017 regrettably called bitcoin a fraud, said he's a "believer" in blockchain technology (JPMorgan now has its own token) and "properly backed, properly regulated" cryptocurrency, but that bitcoin isn't his "cup of tea," and too many questions remain around its regulation.
May require account to read. Few companies have benefited more from the e-commerce shopping boom sparked by the pandemic than Dutch payments firm Adyen NV. The best-performing large stock in Europe this year, Adyen is up almost 120%, vaulting its market value to nearly $60 billion, bigger than some of the region’s top banks, including Swiss giant UBS Group AG . Adyen’s stock performance has even outpaced PayPal Holdings Inc., another beneficiary of the move toward digital payments, which is up about 70%. Unlike PayPal, which hundreds of millions of consumers world-wide use to send money and make internet purchases, Adyen sits behind the scenes, providing the technology that merchants use to process credit card and other types of digital payments.
Square Inc., the payments company run by Jack Dorsey, is among new big investors in Italy’s mobile digital payment platform Satispay SpA, in a move aimed to expand its operations across European markets, according to a statement by Satispay. The San Francisco-based company invested about 15 million euros ($18 million) for a minority stake in Satispay, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be mentioned because the value isn’t public. The deal is part of a larger round of investment of 93 million euros that will also be joined by China’s Tencent Holding Ltd, LGT Lightstone, Telecom Italia SpA’s TIM Ventures and other investors, the statement said.
Fintech leaders around the world are increasingly choosing to work with Visa across key categories including digital wallets, digital banking, ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’, B2B payments, cross-border remittance, bill payments, payments infrastructure, and person-to-person payments. Recent examples of fintechs partnering with Visa include Affirm, BillGO, Finix, Gojek, PayPal, Rappi, Stripe, Varo Bank, and Venmo, among many others. With the expansion of Visa’s industry leading Fast Track program, fintechs are armed with the tools to become category winners. Fast Track participation has grown 360% year-over-year, and Visa has welcomed hundreds of fintechs who are actively engaged in the program.
Over the past five years, high-profile visits to African tech ecosystems by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Alibaba founder Jack Ma have been signposted as marks of validation. Now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the world’s richest man, can be added to the list of global tech leaders drawn to the promise of African technology startups. Chipper Cash, a cross-border, peer to peer payments service, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’s personal venture capital fund. It’s the first investment in an African startup for Bezos’ fund which has also backed global tech brands including Uber, Twitter, and AirBnB.
Ticketmaster UK has been fined 1.25 million pounds ($1.7 million) by Britain's privacy watchdog for its "serious failure" to comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. Regulators say the company failed to properly secure chatbot software that it opted to run on a payments page, which attackers subverted, allowing them to steal payment card information. After being alerted to suspected card fraud that traced to its site, Ticketmaster UK allegedly failed to mitigate the problem for nine more weeks.
A new Point-of-Sale (PoS) malware is targeting devices used by "hundreds of thousands" of organizations in the hospitality sector, researchers have warned. Dubbed ModPipe, the malware is a backdoor able to harvest sensitive information in PoS devices running Oracle Micros Restaurant Enterprise Series (RES) 3700, management software that is particularly popular in the United States. RES 3700 is described by Oracle as the "most widely installed restaurant management software in the industry today." The software suite is used to manage PoS, loyalty programs, reporting, inventory, promotions, and mobile payment.
The job market is showing signs of weakening again, as more Americans file for unemployment benefits amid a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and new restrictions on business aimed at curbing the outbreak. Initial claims for state employment insurance jumped by more than 18,000 to over 743,000 last week, before adjusting for seasonal factors, the Labor Department reported Thursday. It was the first increase since early October and represented an ominous turn for a labor market that has struggled to recover fully from the huge layoffs that accompanied the pandemic’s arrival in March.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell doubled down on his remarks that the economy as we know it is over during a virtual appearance Tuesday at the Bay Area Council Business Hall of Fame Awards Ceremony. "We're not going back to the same economy, we're going back to a different economy," Powell said, echoing comments he made at the European Central Bank's Forum on Central Banking last week. The pandemic has accelerated ongoing trends, including the increasing use of technology, automation and telework, Powell said last Thursday. And while these changes will be beneficial for some, they will hurt certain groups in the short-term.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of millions, and its impact will trickle into how much, and where, consumers plan to spend this holiday season, according to Discover’s annual Holiday Shopping survey. The number of consumers who plan to curb spending almost doubled in one year, from 18% in 2019 to 35% in 2020. The survey also shows Generation Xers and millennials are the most likely to cut back their spending this year, 42% and 36%, respectively. Financial instability and disrupted social engagements are the top reasons consumers report shifting their budgets.
Mastercard continues to deliver on its multi-rail strategy with the addition of Account-to-Account (A2A) payments functionality to Mastercard Track™ Business Payment Service. This launch represents the next phase in Mastercard’s journey to modernize business payments by solving persistent pain points that Buyers and Suppliers experience today. Building on the success of card payments within Mastercard Track Business Payment Service, businesses can now have a similar experience for A2A payments - exchanging data with greater efficiency and facilitating payments across multiple payment rails including Real Time Payments (RTP) and the Automated Clearing House (ACH) in the United States.
PNC Financial Services Group has agreed to buy BBVA USA Bancshares for $11.6 billion in cash. The deal, announced early Monday and expected to close in mid-2021, would rank among the biggest bank combinations since the financial crisis of 2008, creating a coast-to-coast franchise with about $563 billion of assets and branch presence in 29 of the nation’s 30 largest markets. The $104 billion-asset BBVA USA, based in Houston, is a unit of Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. It was formerly known as Compass Bancshares, which the Spanish banking giant acquired in 2007 and rebranded first as BBVA Compass and later BBVA USA. BBVA USA has $86 billion of deposits and $66 billion of loans.
Chase is wading into the booming buy now, pay later market, giving credit card customers the option to pay off a purchase over a period of time with no interest, just a fixed monthly fee. Available for purchases over $100, My Chase Plan enables cardholders to select a recent transaction and choose a repayment timeframe and personal monthly payment amount that can run from three to 18 months. Activated via the bank's online presence or mobile app, My Chase Plan also offers a calculator that will approximate what a particular ‘Plan’ might cost before the purchase is made.
Wirecard's insolvency administrator Michael Jaffe on Monday said the payment system provider's technology platform had been sold to Spain's Banco Santander. “Banco Santander will acquire the technology platform of the payment service provider in Europe as well as all highly specialized technological assets,” Jaffe said in a statement. In a separate statement, Banco Santander said it had agreed to acquire several highly specialised technological assets from the merchant payments business of Wirecard in Europe, to accelerate its growth plans in Europe.
Shopify has expanded its payment options for merchants with a new partnership with Alipay, China’s payments app. The deal will unlock “the power of cross-border commerce for Shopify’s merchants,” Shopify said in a press release that called Alipay “Asia's leading digital wallet platform.” The new payment option will ”allow Shopify merchants to seamlessly accept payments through Alipay from more than one billion annual active users in China alone — and, in the future, hundreds of millions more across Asia,” according to the release.
Marqeta, the global modern card issuing platform, and Uber, the multinational ridesharing pioneer and delivery platform, announced that the two companies have entered into a strategic global card-issuing partnership. Marqeta is already supporting the global growth of Uber Eats through this new partnership, and will serve as Uber’s card issuing partner for future projects. Uber will rely on Marqeta’s modern card issuing technology as a key part of the financial infrastructure that will support its ecosystem of apps, which have more than 100 million monthly global users.
Fiserv, Inc., a leading global provider of payments and financial services technology solutions, has launched a business intelligence platform that enables financial institutions to optimize their card portfolio by harnessing market intelligence along with business and cardholder data. Card Expert from Fiserv aggregates key data and delivers actionable insights in easy-to-use, interactive dashboards, providing financial institutions with the information they need to make critical business decisions about the performance and profitability of their card portfolio.
Truist Financial Corporation announced Sal Karakaplan has been hired as head of its newly formed Enterprise Payments Group. Under Karakaplan's leadership, the Enterprise Payments Group will be responsible for driving a coordinated strategy and execution across Truist's payments businesses, enabling the delivery of next generation payment products, services, and infrastructure to meet clients' needs and drive financial results. "Payments is one of the most important and ubiquitous aspects of banking and will play an increasingly critical role in the future of banking," said Mike Maguire, head of National Consumer Finance & Payments.
Paysafe, a leading specialized payments platform, announced the appointment of Scot McClintic as SVP, iGaming Product & Strategy. The appointment builds on Paysafe’s ongoing commitment to specializing in the fast-growing iGaming and sports betting markets which continue to demonstrate significant potential; in the U.S. alone, Paysafe estimates that iGaming deposit volumes could grow from $3.4bn in 2019 to $24bn by 2025. Reporting into Ben Dalfen, Paysafe’s EVP, U.S. iGaming, McClintic has responsibility for collaborating closely with Paysafe’s iGaming, iLottery and sports betting merchants and partners to further strengthen Paysafe’s market leading iGaming product portfolio.
USA Technologies, Inc., a cashless payments and software services company that provides end-to-end technology solutions for the self-service retail market, announced that it will transition its corporate identity to exclusively operate under the name Cantaloupe, Inc. The Nasdaq ticker symbol will change when the official launch is announced. “This is a major milestone for us, as Cantaloupe already has built great equity in the industry, strong customer loyalty and communicates our vision to become the leading hardware and software platform for a contactless economy,” said Sean Feeney, chief executive officer, USA Technologies.
BNP Paribas SA is considering the sale of its Italian payments unit Axepta SpA, according to people with knowledge of the matter, adding to a spate of deals in the rapidly consolidating sector. France’s largest bank is speaking with advisers about a disposal early next year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The Italian merchant acquiring unit, which specializes in the management of electronic payments, may be valued at as much as 200 million euros ($240 million) and is expected to attract interest from industry peers, according to one of the people.
NMI, a leading payments enablement technology company, announces the certification of the Verifone UX line of unattended card payment solutions with Chase Paymentech. The certification gives independent software vendors (ISVs) a powerful unattended option for EMV contact- and contactless-based payments in the United States that’s essential for card in, card out parking solutions. The Verifone UX is immediately available to NMI partners and merchants, while additional processor certifications are scheduled for Q4 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021.
SpotOn Transact, Inc (“SpotOn”), a leading supplier of operating software and merchant services for small- and medium-sized businesses and restaurants, is expanding its solutions for those who need to integrate contact tracing and other enhanced COVID-19 compliance requirements into their operations. SpotOn’s new product leverages reservations management software to record and store necessary contact tracing information, which ensures that if a business needs to alert customers to a COVID-19 event, their contact information is easily accessible.
Toast, a restaurant management platform, is launchingToastGo2, a mobile handheld point-of-sale that works with the Toast Order & Pay platform to facilitate ordering and paying from a guest's smartphone, according to a press release. Toast Go2 is drop-proof from up to four feet, IP54-rated for spill, dust resistance and integrates with Toast's restaurant-grade hardware and software. The mobile POS handhelds offer contactless checkout with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and tap-to-pay; feature a 24-hour battery life and processing speeds three times faster than its predecessor, according to the release.
CardFlight, the leading SaaS payment technology company, today announced that more than 20,000 new merchants this year have begun using its signature payments solution, SwipeSimple. Now used by more than 70,000 small businesses nationwide, SwipeSimple allows merchants the flexibility to meet today’s ever-changing market needs and accept payments on the go, in their stores, and at their computers, thanks to its omnichannel capabilities.
Nuvei Corporation, the global payment technology partner of thriving brands, announced that its subsidiary Nuvei Technologies Inc. (“Nuvei” or the “Company”) has received approval to support the sports betting and iGaming industry in West Virginia. Nuvei is a full-service payments provider to the iGaming and sports betting industries. The Company’s application for a West Virginia Lottery i-Gaming Interim Supplier license and Sports Wagering Interim Supplier license were approved by the West Virginia Lottery Commission.
Sezzle Inc. the mission-driven installment payment solution, announces its partnership with global eCommerce platform Wix. The partnership brings Sezzle's business-boosting 'Buy Now, Pay Later' option to Wix's massive roster of businesses and online stores and their buyers. The Sezzle solution will go live just in time for the holiday shopping season in November. After a disruptive year, amid a global pandemic and consumer belt-tightening, budget-conscious shoppers are embracing Sezzle's installment plans.
The OLB Group, Inc., a provider of cloud-based omnicommerce and payment acceptance solutions for small- and mid-sized merchants, announced its SecurePay payment gateway and OmniSoft cloud-based business management platform are ready to support merchants selling cannabis- and hemp-derived products, including CBD. The services will be available to merchants as soon as U.S. regulators allow.
